With all the WRITERS now available from AI, we knew it wouldn’t be long before the robo-spam entered the content world. It’s been happening for years, but it’s about to get much slicker, harder to detect, and full of crap you don’t care about. “Building strong personal connections with your audience,” says the advertisement for this tool that’s going to boost your social influence through the roof. You’re about to be an INFLUENCER.

I’m not concerned about *ai* waking up and becoming sentient. I’m concerned that the genie being unleashed in all countries of the world is the robo-caller for the web. Put it on PLAY, COLLECT, REPEAT, forever.

But it’s not an audience, it’s a following. They are not reading your *bs* they are scrolling past. Likes *are* considered engagement, BUT, and this is a big but, they are NOT BUSINESS. You’re influence may appear large and personally connected, but social media connections are not “personal connections” but “what can you do for me” connections. Let me explain the difference.

I write a highly personal blog about being a single father. My posts are often about wins and losses in my life. They are “personal” they are about me, they contain my feelings, thoughts, and hopes for the future growth of my own happiness, and more importantly, the happiness of my two kids.

The influencer, sharing photos of what they ate for breakfast, um… Yes, it’s social, but it’s not personal. There’s no “personal connection” with a TikTok account you’re following. You might imagine you are connected to Taylor Swift because you see all the things she posts and you like her music, and she was just named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

[Wait!? For what? Taylor Swift is the best we have to represent the human race? See kids, this is why we’re doomed. #okboomer]

In the prompt above for building your audience, the advice is to share all parts of your journey. And that’s just what a lot of “influencer wannabes” are doing. Growing followers. Sharing stupid details about their Starbucks Pumpkin Oat Chai Latte. I’m guessing Starbucks is not paying them. But, in some odd way, our kids are paying them. In attention. Plenty of adults too, don’t get me wrong. One of the most annoying sounds in my life is my family watching TikTok or Instagram posts with the sound up. “Honey, can I loan you my AirPods™?”

That advice for aspiring influencers is great for building a volume of content. Who cares if that content is lattes and morning oats, it’s content, it’s shared, and it’s building your audience.

Here’s the thing about influencers: if you’re hoping to get paid to do social media you’re about to be fighting for attention with AI scripts that can build and post 10,000 social moments an hour. Prompt-driven video is already happening. In one spooky, but somewhat interesting way, I used an ai-video tool that looked at a URL of my website and created a realistic narrative about a client who was “so impressed” with my coaching work. “It changed my life.”

Except there was no woman, she was not a real person. Her lips moved in an approximation of the words, but she was a digital avatar of a woman. And her story… 100% bullshit. I love what she said, except it’s not true. And I’m not marketing my life coaching business. It’s more of an adjunct to my real job, and the work I do writing hopeful and optimistic strategies for divorced women and men. That’s enough for me. I’m not going to share my daily routine for working out, or my favorite recipe for my new bread maker. I’m going to try and expose a little bit of the humanity of my life as a single father to one boy and one girl. That’s it.

Here’s the difference: my story is a personal story, I am sharing feelings, relationships, ideas, hopes, and dreams. The influencer’s daily Starbucks run, or Target Shopping Tactics is social and media but it’s not personal. No more than watching a bio-pic funded by the man himself, on how great Beckham is.

Do you know Beckham and his wife now? Have you built a personal connection with them? I’d say, no. You might feel like there is now a heart connection between you and David Beckham, but it’s only your fandom.

Being a fan of a woman sharing her “eating to stay thin” routine is fine. The fact that she’s 22 years old and was born thin is not mentioned, but still, she’s inspiring her 5,000 followers to eat better, take smaller bites, and quit eating before you are full. Great. She’s a broadcaster, an influencer, and a personality. She is not sharing what’s hard in her life. She’s not exploring the pain of having a sibling who’s experimenting with drugs and ending up in rehab over and over. That’s not what her channel is about. It’s about fashion, eating, and staying healthy. But the soul is lacking.

AI is very good at mimicking language. It can examine all the best-performing posts on TikTok and devise a formula for success. Then, (sorry hopeful influencers) the AI will build a realistic Tok and promote it as “building a personal relationship with your audience.” Except there’s no HUMAN involved. The story is a hash of old TikTok content, respun into a new hash.

And then AI Social Bots are going to create and publish thousands of influencer posts a day. And that’s one system. These helpful, “co-pilot” systems are using AI to build stories, show testimonials, write reviews, spam YELP, and any other loophole you can find on the web, and there are millions of them, and blasting the human content off the 2nd and 3rd pages of results.

So, if you want to be a human influencer, maybe consider your “personal” story and see if that’s what you’re hoping to use to connect with people as individuals, not as products or customers.

Here’s the frightening AI Marketing Video (2) that was created by pointing the bot at a single page on my blog about life coaching.

Good luck out there. Let’s all be MORE HUMAN and MORE KIND.

John McElhenney —  LinkedIn

Please check out a few of my books on AMAZON. 

Especially this one, about living a creative and human life of intention and joy.